Something Beautiful
by chaserzachsmith
Summary: Five wishes Luna Lovegood made, and the realisation that birthdays aren't really that important, after all.


She celebrated her tenth birthday with her father. They had tried very hard to make things the way her mother would have, to decorate the house with flowers and to make the cake fluffy in light. They came up short. They often did.

"Make a wish, Luna," her father said, and Luna closed her eyes and thought about Hogwarts- all the things her parents told her. The trick stairs and the suits of armour and high ceilings, the ghosts (Daddy always said ghosts were the wisest of people) and the towers and the way things would change.

 _Let me go_ , she thought, _and let me be happy there._

When Luna was eleven, she climbed into the Hogwarts express with big eyes and waved goodbye to her father and promised to write, and then the train started and she had to hold onto the wall in the corridor to keep from falling over.

All the compartments were full by the time she'd made it down the aisle, and so she picked up her trunk and found one with a small group of kids who looked about her age. She didn't talk to them, but pulled out a Quibbler and read it. When they saw that, they were quite content not to talk to her, either.

That year, she celebrated her birthday alone in her bed with the curtains drawn and a little cake she'd gotten from the kitchen. She didn't know how to conjure candles, so she just imagined one instead. It was better than nothing.

[] [] []

When she turned fifteen, she celebrated it with Ginny. It was a Hogsmeade weekend, for Valentine's day, and the first time Luna was grateful for the proximity of the dates.

Luna had a meeting for lunch with Hermione Granger and Harry Potter, and Ginny had a date with Michael Corner, but they met in the Three Broomsticks afterward and Ginny bought them butterbeers and a cake. This time, there was a candle in it.

 _Let this last,_ Luna thought. _Let me keep this friend._

"It's so much better when you don't have to imagine it," said Luna, with her mouth full of cake. (If you have something to say, might as well say it, cake or not.)

"Imagine what?" asked Ginny, somewhat bemused. "The cupcake?"

"The candle," said Luna, then, after thinking for a moment, "and the friend."

Ginny looked down for a moment, and then said, falsely bright, "Well, you won't ever need to imagine them anymore."

Luna nodded. "I hope not," she confessed.

"Never," promised Ginny. They sat for a moment, then Ginny grinned. "So, what'd Hermione want you to do?"

Fifteen was a good year for Luna, all things considered. Yes, she got Stunned very spectacularly in the Department of Mysteries. That was actually, all in all, a very terrifying experience. But fifteen was the year that she made her first Patronus, the year she first had any friends, the year the Quibbler had a real hit.

She painted faces on her ceiling- Ginny, Neville, Ron, Harry, Hermione- friends, she had _friends_ , and they'd all fought for each other.

It's a truly beautiful thing, she thought, to have friends.

When Luna was sixteen, her roommate Katherine Montgomery disappeared for a week to attend her brother's funeral, and when she returned, she pulled Luna aside, ashamed and nervous.

"I didn't throw them out," she said, and handed Luna a bag. "I'm so sorry."

Luna looked into the bag. There was the pretty rock she'd found outside her yard, there was her book on the meaning of dreams, there was a deck of Exploding Snap cards, there was a tiny flowerpot, the mushrooms it had once held long dead.

She hugged the bag to her chest. "Thank you," she said, and meant it. "And I forgive you."

She meant that, too, and by the end of that year, Katherine and a few other Ravenclaws managed to return everything she'd lost since first year.

Except, oddly enough, her long purple socks, with the green embroidery. But really, perhaps that wasn't so much a loss as a thing of good luck.

[] [] []

Sometimes, when she asked, Peter Pettigrew would give her the date. He was responsible for bringing down food when Draco Malfoy was at school.

"What's the date?" she asked, one time, and he said, after checking over his shoulder that nobody was there to hear it, "February twelfth."

"Oh," she said. She remembered a moment too late to thank him, and then the door shut again and they were in the darkness.

"Why do you ask?" asked Mr. Ollivander, his voice a faint creak in the dark. "Are you waiting for something?"

Luna knew, by now, the number of steps to where she and Ollivander made their encampment, and she made it there easily and set the food down. "Here," she said, instead of answering his question. "There's the spoon."

They don't talk and eat. Once Luna had thought it was ridiculous to censor your thoughts for things like food, but in the dungeon, food had a tendency of being inconsistent and scarce, and really, they have all the time in the world to talk. She said, finally, when she had scraped up the last of the soup, her voice small, "Tomorrow is my birthday."

There was a long moment; neither of them said anything, and then Mr. Ollivander let out a heavy sigh. "How old are you, my dear?"

"Seventeen," she said. She would come of age.

He sighed again. "I'm sorry."

"No," said Luna, because he shouldn't be sorry for anything. "No, don't be."

"I wish," he said, and then stopped short. They both wished a lot of things. "I wish you could come of age under better circumstances, Luna."

She did, too, but she shrugged. He couldn't see her, of course. She knew that. "It's alright," she says. "It's not special, really. At this point, we really ought to celebrate other things. The days when we meet our friends and days when we learn things we've wanted to know."

They were both Ravenclaws; Luna rather thought Mr. Ollivander would understand very well.

He woke her up the next day by shaking her shoulder. "Do they want us?" she asked, before registering that the dungeon was still dark, the door was still shut. She hasn't seen the sun in two months, she realised. What a sad thing.

"No," said Mr. Ollivander. "Where's your hand-"

She put her hand over his, and he nodded and took it. Pressed something hard and cold into her hand. "Here," he said. "To celebrate coming of age, eh?"

"What is it?" she asked, knowing well what it was. She turned it over in her hands, touched the dial tentatively, tapped at the face with her nail to hear the sound, and closed her eyes. It didn't do anything, of course.

"I couldn't take this," she said, voice choked.

"It was from my father," said Mr. Ollivander. "No, I've had it long enough, it's served it's time. Eighty-four years is a long time…"

"I couldn't," she repeated, and she turned it over in her hands again.

Ollivander sighed heavily, and she heard him carefully scooting himself closer. "It's dark, so you can't see it, but it was beautiful, when it was new," he said. "It's all I have, I wish I could do more-"

"No," she said firmly. "No, Mr. Ollivander, you do too much already-"

"It's gold, a bit old, still shiny if you polish it," he said quietly. "I looked at it every day for eighty-four years. There's a little dent in the back that's been hammered back, but you can- could, at least- see where it used to be. The hands are black. There's a little star behind the twelve."

She reopened her eyes. "It's beautiful," she said.

[] [] []

"Open it," she said. Mr. Ollivander's hands were shaky, but he cracked the little box open.

"It's new, but you still need to polish it, I'd imagine," said Luna, and she smiled tentatively. He lifted it out of the box, turned it over in his hands.

"It's beautiful," he said, and cracked a small smile. "Thank you, my dear."

"Of course," said Luna, and even thought they didn't have a cake, or a candle, she made a wish anyway. _Let him be happy, for a very long time._

That year, she went to the Appalachian Mountains, to Brazil, to Sudan. She had spent far too much time indoors, those long four months five years ago, and she intended to make up for that by seeing as much of the world as she could. And if she learned things, discovered things, created things- well, that was a bonus.

"May I ask the occasion?" Mr. Ollivander asked, and smiled. It was tired, old, weary- but happy. "My birthday is, after all, in September-"

Luna smiled and closed the box again. "Birthdays aren't so special, I think," she said. "Today is the day we met. Or near to it, anyway."

She forgot her twenty-third birthday, that year, because she was in a tent in the forest, and she didn't mind at all.


End file.
